In 1968, the artist Carolee Schneemann delivered a lecture at the ICA in London, during which she repeatedly undressed and re-dressed herself while discussing one of her great influences as an artist. “Does a woman have intellectual authority?” she asked at the time. “Can she have public authority while naked and speaking?” The scandalised response to Schneemann’s intermittent nakedness rather eclipsed the significance of the artist about whom she was speaking: Paul Cézanne.
The choice was heartfelt, and considered. The influence of Cézanne is clear in Schneemann’s fractured, evolved, sensation-driven early paintings, both landscapes and nudes. As a drawing-crazy kid, looking through art books for inspiration, she had searched in vain for female role models. “I decided a painter named Cézanne would be my mascot; I would assume Cézanne was unquestionably a woman – after all the “anne” in it was feminine,” she wrote in her 1975 pamphlet Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter.
